Purchasing your first guitar

Adam Maghout
a.maghout@uu.nl

Methodology & Statistics @ UU University

25 Sep 2024

Getting into guitar

So you’ve done it. You’ve finally decided to start playing guitar after years of telling yourself it was too difficult. But you’re not alone. There are tons of resources online for you to embark on your guitar playing journey. Check out some of these awesome websites where you can find tabs and other useful tips and tricks.

Which Guitar Should I Start Playing?

Simply put, there are three main types of guitars: classical, acoustic, and electric. Choosing which one to start with really depends on what you’ll be wanting to play. They are all very similar though, so if you know how to play on one, you’ll definitely be able to play on the other two.

Classical Guitar

Acoustic Guitar

Electric Guitar

Pros and cons

Acoustic guitar

  • Easy to play anywhere, don’t need any additional set-up
  • Fuller sound so better to play on its own
  • Better for percussion depending on the wood
  • Cheap guitars will generally sound good if you know how to play

  • Difficult to play softly so no rehearsing at night
  • Neck is larger and strings are thicker, making it harder to learn
  • Less flexibility in terms of sound
  • More precision is needed to sound good, little wiggle room for error

Electric guitar

  • Great for solos, allows for a lot of effects like artificial bends and distortion
  • Strings are lighter and nicer to play
  • Neck is narrow so ideal for smaller hands
  • More options in terms of design: V-neck, stratocaster…
  • Can be played through headphones so as to not annoy your neighbours

  • Good guitars are more expensive, in addition to the cost of the amp
  • Guitars can get quite heavy, depending on the number of pickups
  • Tone is less warm and full than an acoustic guitar
  • More equipment is necessary to play so can become cumbersome

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter …

You should only start playing if you really want to. Playing guitar shouldn’t be a chore but something you look forward to when you come back from a long day of work. So pick the guitar that’s right for you!

Oliver Wood

“They are effectively demystifying what it means to be an artist. They are showing that the guitar is not necessarily an intimidating instrument for virtuosos—it’s a means of expressing yourself.” Molenda (2019)

Ideas for music to play

Data used

To measure which genres are popular to play, we will analyse a dataset concerning Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Albums of All Time from 2012. This list is revised every decade so a newer list is available but has not been generously turned into a manipulable dataset and published on data.world like the 2012 list.

We must first load this dataset into R, which can be executed silently. We will also load useful packages at the same time.

Exploring the data

There is a variety of subgenres present in the loaded dataset. In a first time, it might be interesting to simply explore how songs were classified. Since these were added to the dataset using a python package, this will also help identify potential misclassifications.

What about specific artists or gender?

There aren’t many repeat artists in the data, and gender is not given so not much can be done here without a larger and more detailed dataset. The code in R for obtaining counts for artists and gender in such a situation is however presented out of interest.

artist_counts <- RollingStone %>%
  count(Artist, sort = TRUE)
  
gender_counts <- RollingStone %>%
  count(Gender, sort = TRUE)

Conclusion

Put in the effort and time and learning the guitar can be very rewarding.

\[\begin{align*} 10,000 \text{ hours} &= \text{Rehearsing} + \text{Motivation} \\ &\Rightarrow \text{Proficiency} \end{align*}\]

The sky is the limit!

References

Molenda, Michael. 2019. “Who Will Save the Guitar?” In The Rock History Reader, 3rd ed., 419–26. Routledge.

Adam Maghout @ UU